Guest guest Posted May 28, 2002 Report Share Posted May 28, 2002 Meditation of the week from the cybermonks The Impossible is Not a Dream In the Columbia River Gorge, from miles away, you can see Beacon Rock standing alone, a column of basalt 850 feet tall. It is reportedly, the second largest freestanding stone in the world, after Gibraltar. Your friend, showing you the sights might say, “Let’s climb that.” You might reply, “Are you nuts? We’d be killed. I’m not a rock climber. It’s straight up!” If your daring friend persisted, you might find yourself in a panic, knowing that it would be impossible for you to ever reach the top of such a monolith. Not being a particularly assertive person and not wanting to seem a wimp, you allow your friend to drive you to Beacon Rock State Park. There you encounter children and elderly persons with their dachshunds, whose conversations suggest they’ve been to the top. Still anxious, but now confused as well, you proceed to the base of the rock where you find a trail with handrails and many switchbacks. It becomes clear now, that the climb may be aerobically intensive, but completely safe and quite doable. At the top, you rest your lungs while appreciating the magnificent view. Your initial fears are completely forgotten. The point of this little parable is that sometimes we let our ignorance and fear stop us from doing things that seem impossible, because we don’t know the way. If we’ve never been taught to use our breath, thoughts and mental imagery to alter our emotions, the task seems impossible and we remain victimized by feelings. If our experience with money has been limited to poverty and we don’t know how prosperity works, wealth may seem like something other people have, but out of reach for us. If our illness has only been treated with a single medical model, our expectations for healing may be far less than they need be. If we’ve grown up surrounded by untrustworthy, uncaring people, we likely assume that everybody is that way, and we settle for less in our relationships. As we develop our egos, we learn our capacities, but also our limits. We figure out what kind of person we are, what we are capable of and what we are not capable of. Sometimes, though, we set closer limits than we need to. Our fears and ignorance can keep us from becoming whom we could be. Joseph Campbell used to tell his student, “Follow your bliss.” Instead of recoiling from fears or doing what everybody else thinks you can or should do, follow the lead of that inner compass that tells you what makes you happy. If you direct your mind toward the source of your bliss, your deep satisfaction and joy, you can go beyond your self-imposed limits. As you go down that path with an open mind, the way becomes clearer. Tools appear. Teachers appear. Capabilities you never knew you had become available to develop into new skills. You don’t need to choose the way of your parents or your schoolmates or of popular culture. Life can be bigger than we think. We just need the intention to find the way, the skillful means to our end. Practice: Observe your self-imposed limits. Where do you say, “Oh, I can’t do that. Other people might, but not me”? Observe your fears. What activities do you avoid because you are afraid of them? Consider the range of human behavior. Notice that some people do things you are afraid to do or that seem impossible for you to do because you don’t understand how to do it. Notice that some people speak in public, feel comfortable in high places, break boards with their bare hands, control pain with their minds, run marathons, make money in the stock market, find jobs they like, have satisfying relationships, control their heart rate and body temperature through meditation, heal people in mysterious ways, play musical instruments, jump out of perfectly good airplanes and survive, learn new languages and travel the world. What have you always wanted to do but haven’t because of self imposed constraints? What would you need to do to take a step closer to the path of your bliss? -- http://solarraven.com/ Huna, Crystal healing, Reiki manuals, mandalas, Energy Work Classes http://home.attbi.com/~skygreen/index.html / Spirited emotion} http://members.tripod.com/~sunsparrow/index.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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